Some states in the U.S. are closing virus testing sites despite fears of a new surge.

Once a new surge or variant arrives and starts driving up testing demand, no rush to reopen mass testing sites, no matter how expedited, can make up for the lost time, said Cassandra Pierre, the medical director of public health programs at Boston Medical Center.

For instance, Colorado health officials have said they could reopen mass testing sites within four to five weeks. In that time, Dr. Pierre said, the peak of a surge may have already passed and left hospitals overwhelmed with severely ill patients.

Even reopening testing sites in as little as one to two weeks would not be sufficient, Dr. Pierre said.

Closing state-run sites also requires local hospitals, pharmacies and community-based groups to absorb the additional demand. Those that are already straining to serve populations most in need may not be able to do so, Dr. Pierre said.

Still, state health departments have been under unsustainable strain. Federal funding is dwindling, and more money may not be coming. Staff shortages and death threats have become commonplace.

The testing site closures may have been inevitable given the enormous stressors on the public health work force, said Gigi Gronvall, a testing expert at Johns Hopkins University.

There are positive signs. Private providers are better prepared than they previously have been, Dr. Gronvall said, and increased immunity in the general population and the widespread availability of rapid tests will help.

She added that the sites are not the only way for health departments to monitor or address a potential surge. But the question remains: What happens if the virus takes a turn for the worse? Or if a variant emerges for which existing vaccines aren’t protective?

“You don’t want to fearmonger, but this is part of planning,” Dr. Gronvall said. “This is the kind of thing that public health departments need to be thinking about.”

“You use the quiet periods to do the hard work,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “You don’t use the quiet to forget.”

The clearest warnings that the brief period of quiet may soon be over have come, as they often have in the past two years, from Western Europe. In a number of countries, including Britain, France and Germany, case numbers are climbing as an even more contagious subvariant of Omicron, known as BA.2, takes hold.

In interviews, 10 epidemiologists and infectious disease experts said that many of the ingredients were in place for the same to happen in the United States, though it was unclear if or when a wave might hit or how severe it might be.

Case numbers are still dropping nationally, but BA.2 accounts for a growing proportion of those infections, rising to almost one-quarter of new cases last week. The subvariant is estimated to be 30 to 50 percent more contagious than the previous version of Omicron, BA.1.

In New York City, average daily case numbers rose by roughly 40 percent over the past two weeks, though they remain extremely low compared with recent months. In Connecticut, scientists estimate that the frequency of BA.2 infections is doubling every seven or eight days — half the rate of Omicron’s growth this winter, but also considerably faster than the Delta variant’s 11-day doubling time before that.

“I expect we’ll see a wave in the U.S. sooner than what most people expect,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He said that it could come as soon as April, or perhaps later in the spring or the early summer.

And given that some cases inevitably turn more serious, Dr. Andersen said, “yes, such a wave would be accompanied by rising hospitalizations and deaths.”

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Some experts cautioned, however, that BA.2 had not driven up case numbers in every country where it emerged. In a best-case scenario, they said, even if American case numbers started climbing, leftover immunity from the first Omicron wave this winter could help protect against a heavy surge of hospital admissions. And a shift toward outdoor socializing could temper an increase in case numbers.

For now, there are fewer Covid patients in intensive care units than during almost any other point in the pandemic. The vaccines appear to protect as well against BA.2 as they did against the previous version of Omicron, according to British data, and BA.2 does not seem to cause any more or less severe disease.

In trying to forecast what lies ahead, American health officials and scientists have debated what mixture of factors has driven up case numbers in Europe and just how serious the wave there could get.

The BA.2 subvariant began its march across Europe around the time that certain countries were lifting restrictions and mask mandates, potentially giving it extra kindling for its spread. Some scientists in Britain have also attributed that country’s surge in part to the fact that immunity tends to weaken over time following vaccinations or earlier infections.

In some parts of Europe, like Denmark and the Netherlands, the peak of the BA.2 wave has already passed. In other countries, where case numbers have climbed since early March, hospital admissions have remained flat or risen only slightly.

But Britain has emerged as a more startling example of the potential for a surge in BA.2 cases to begin filling up hospital beds, too. People 70 and older in England have been infected at record levels, health officials said, with estimates that roughly one in every 30 people in that age group had Covid in the week before March 12.

As a result, the number of hospitalized Covid patients there has climbed by around 35 percent in recent weeks, though about half of those had tested positive incidentally after admission. To bolster protection, Britain plans to start administering fourth doses to older people later this month.

In the United States, too, scientists are concerned that so many people have gone more than six months since their last doses of vaccine, reducing levels of immunity. Pfizer and BioNTech have asked American regulators to authorize fourth doses in older people, and Moderna is seeking clearance for the additional shots for all adults.

It is less clear whether relaxing Covid rules in the United States will help fuel transmission to the same degree that it may have in some European nations. Parts of the United States have effectively been without restrictions for months.

“There are lots of moving parts,” said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s really difficult to disentangle which of these is driving any given wave.”

Fewer than half of Americans who have received primary vaccine doses have taken booster shots, putting the United States in a more precarious position. Even though case numbers are so low, nearly 1,200 Americans on average are dying each day from Covid — a rate far higher than in Western Europe, where older people tend to have received vaccines and boosters in higher numbers.

As time passes, two doses become less effective at preventing Omicron-related hospitalizations, British estimates suggest, whereas a booster dose restores protection to considerably higher levels.

Adding to the alarm in the United States, this week a number of wastewater testing sites had showed drastic increases in viral levels on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention map.

But scientists said that it was difficult to measure changes while viral levels were so low and that the true picture was more muddled: Some wastewater sites in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut and Ohio had observed growing viral levels, while many others had not.

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Whatever lies ahead, scientists said that now was the time to get more people vaccinated, while the country still had a say in the shape of any coming wave.

“We should be reading about how the federal government is using its resources to go nursing home to nursing home, and church to church, to get booster numbers up,” said Sam Scarpino, the managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation.

But the federal government is warning that pandemic funds are drying up. Senate Republicans have said that they will not approve $15 billion in new coronavirus aid without offsetting it by cutting spending elsewhere. House Democrats have balked at a proposal to repurpose money intended for state governments to spend on their pandemic responses.

With the aid package stymied for now, federal officials said that they would need to start cutting shipments of monoclonal antibody treatments to states next week by more than 30 percent. The government has secured 20 million antiviral pills, but orders for more are on hold. And by June, officials said, the federal government’s efforts to ensure that companies keep producing enough tests will run out of money, imperiling capacity for later this year.

There is not enough money to guarantee sufficient purchases of variant-specific booster shots if they are needed, federal officials said. And while those shortages would affect all Americans, uninsured people would face particular risks because a federal program to reimburse providers for testing, treating and vaccinating those without insurance could end in early April.

“There are so many things we could be doing, yet the United States has time and time again chosen to be reactive, rather than proactive, and that has cost us dearly,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “We’ve been wearing rose-colored glasses instead of correcting our vision.”

A key question remains how much protection people who got sick with the previous version of Omicron can count on — and for how long. A lab study published this week found that vaccinated people who were infected with Omicron had high levels of antibodies that would probably protect against BA.2. If that protection lasts, it could reduce the impact of any wave, given the country’s high levels of infection this winter.

“I think it’s reassuring,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, a virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a co-author of the study.

But some scientists said they worried that the immune defenses people built up during the first Omicron surge would wane, leaving them more susceptible to BA.2.

“The timing of BA.2’s emergence, and the potential waning in immunity from the BA.1 wave with masks coming off, isn’t great,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.

Even health experts who said they had become accustomed to the boom-bust cycle of pandemic funding said they were shocked that the money was drying up so soon after the country had outlined plans for adjusting to a new normal.

That money, they said, was essential for avoiding full-scale shutdowns, and instead detecting surges early enough that health officials could recommend masks or increased testing in particular areas and help hospitals prepare.

“People naturally, sensibly want to get back to their lives,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. “The question, then, is how quickly would we be able to stand up a response?”

The mushrooming of outbreaks around the country could quickly overwhelm the medical system if every person who tested positive were sent to a hospital, as was required until recently. It could wear down the armies of community workers and neighborhood volunteers tasked with organizing mass PCR tests for millions of people every day and checking on residents under quarantine. Lengthy, unpredictable lockdowns could wipe out the already razor-thin profits of many factories or lead to layoffs of service workers.

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In his remarks to top officials last week, Mr. Xi said officials should strive for “maximum effect” with “minimum cost” in controlling the virus, reflecting concerns about the economy’s slowing growth. Yet his order to swiftly contain the outbreaks underscored a broader question about how far his rhetoric on controlling costs would go. On Friday, Chinese health officials emphasized to reporters that the effort to be more targeted did not amount to a relaxing of the policy.

Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, said Mr. Xi was signaling a “willingness to adapt and to reduce the disruptions to the economy,” but not that the government was giving up control.

The ruling Communist Party’s zero-tolerance approach creates high costs for officials should outbreaks occur under their watch, Mr. Yang said, pointing to the recent firings of top officials in Jilin City and a district in the city of Changchun as examples. State media reported that more than two dozen officials had been dismissed in recent weeks, accused of negligence in responding to the outbreaks.

For many in China, everyday life has been upended since the latest wave began. Tens of millions of people are now under some form of lockdown. Factories have suspended work and truck traffic has been delayed, snarling already frayed supply chains. In some areas of the major metropolises of Shenzhen and Shanghai, life has ground to a halt as offices and schools have been shuttered and residents have been ordered to stay in their homes.

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In Shanghai, the authorities have avoided imposing a citywide lockdown, using contact tracing instead to contain neighborhoods deemed high-risk. Still, the restrictions have hit the bottom line for businesses, such as a spicy hot pot restaurant in the upscale Xuhui district of Shanghai.

Zhang Liang, the owner of the restaurant, said his profits had plunged by more than 80 percent since the lockdowns began. He was worried about his bills.

“We’re still open, but no one is coming,” Mr. Zhang said.

The lockdown is taking a toll on residents in other ways. Tang Min, a 37-year-old gas station worker in a town in Jilin Province, was among residents ordered to stay at home. Days later, she was running out of the prescription medicine she takes to treat her depression.

She called the local government hotline, and neighborhood volunteers eventually brought her more medicine, just before she would have run out.

“When I don’t take medicine, I don’t feel like I have much to live for,” Ms. Tang said in a telephone interview.

China’s stringent virus controls still appear to enjoy widespread support, with people hoping to avoid the devastation Covid has wrought on hospitals and communities around the world. But in recent weeks, there have been signs that the public’s patience is wearing thin.

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When Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert from Shanghai, suggested last summer that China should learn to live with the virus, he was attacked online as a puppet of foreigners. Now, people online have started debating the question of how long the measures will last. Some have even joked that the government should “lie flat,” a reference to a popular term among Chinese millennials for pushing back against societal pressures by doing less.

“People seem to be increasingly fed up with these excessive anti-Covid measures,” said Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University.

But the outbreak in Hong Kong — where patients on gurneys have been parked outside hospitals and body bags have piled up in wards — has shocked many in the mainland. Charts showing high Covid death rates in Hong Kong, where many older residents are unvaccinated, have been ricocheting around Chinese social media.

The toll on older people in Hong Kong has spurred officials in China to redouble efforts to boost vaccinations among the country’s vulnerable groups. More than 87 percent of China’s population has been fully vaccinated. But among people 80 and older, just over half have had two shots, and less than 20 percent have received a booster, Zeng Yixin, a vice minister of the National Health Commission, said on Friday.

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Officials have announced plans to send vaccination trucks to inoculate the many older Chinese who live in less accessible rural areas. Misinformation about the vaccines and a lack of urgency stemming from the relatively low number of cases have exacerbated the problem.

For months, Li Man, a 69-year-old housewife in Beijing, put off getting vaccinated, believing that she was at low risk for contracting the virus because she did not often go out. Eventually, at the urging of her daughter, she got the jab a few months ago. But in a telephone interview, she said she still felt it had been unnecessary.

“China’s situation is way better than in the United States or other Western countries,” Ms. Li said.

Ms. Li’s confidence points to the high stakes the government faces as it tries to calibrate its response. Beijing has touted China’s low number of deaths from the virus as a sign of the superiority of the country’s top-down, centralized system. A failure to contain the latest surge could erode the party’s legitimacy.

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With each new variant, tracing the chain of transmission has become more difficult. Last month, a village near Shenzhen was locked down for nearly three weeks. The community was later cleared and the lockdown was lifted. But within a few days, cases began to emerge, and the village was placed under lockdown again.

In allowing the use of at-home test kits, officials have said that the onus was on residents to report any positive results to their local authorities. Jiao Yahui, an official with China’s National Health Commission, said on Friday that people would be punished if they failed to do so, but she did not specify what the consequences might be.

Even if the authorities succeed in quashing all infections in the current wave, it will only be a matter of time before the next outbreak, said Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. That is why, he said, China urgently needs to come up with a road map to learn how to live with the virus.

“It’s the only option,” Mr. Jin said. “It’s almost impossible now to come back to zero.”

Keith Bradsher contributed reporting. Li You contributed research.

Dr. Jha’s selection signals two things about Mr. Biden’s thinking. First, the president wants to keep the federal pandemic response centered in the White House, instead of delegating it to the Department of Health and Human Services or one of its agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Second, he wants to put it in the hands of a public health expert. Dr. Jha is replacing Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur and management consultant who presided over a huge mobilization of coronavirus vaccines, tests and therapeutics over the past 14 months.

With the supply and logistics infrastructure now in place, Dr. Jha will face different challenges. Virus cases are rising in parts of Europe and Asia, and most experts, including Dr. Fauci, believe the numbers will rise again here. Yet many Americans do not want to think about the pandemic anymore. Mask mandates have lifted all over the country — even the federal Department of Health and Human Services is making masks optional — and many Americans will most likely resist putting them back on, even if conditions warrant it.

“How this plays out depends on how the dynamics of Covid play out, and frankly how much time elapses before he has to tell the American people we’re in trouble as well,” Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant health secretary for preparedness and response during the Obama administration, said of Dr. Jha. “And that could plausibly happen before he steps into this role, or on Day 1.”

Dr. Jha may also get caught up in a bitter funding battle between the White House and Congress, where the administration’s request for $22.5 billion in emergency coronavirus relief aid is stalled. If no agreement is reached by the time he takes office in April, the government will be out of money to buy more therapeutics and vaccines.

Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has had regular conversations with some of the city’s most influential business leaders, including David Solomon, chief executive at the banking firm Goldman Sachs, and Jonathan Gray, president of the private equity firm Blackstone, to seek their advice — a stark contrast to Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, who had a fraught relationship with the business community.

The meetings have underscored not just Mr. Adams’s focus on reopening the city, whose economy has been devastated by the pandemic and is only now slowly rebounding toward health, but also his determination to work with the city’s business leaders in making it happen.

Since taking office in January, Mr. Adams, a former police captain, has had to respond to a series of high-profile crimes, including the shooting deaths of two police officers and violent attacks against Asian Americans. That continued last weekend, with the stabbing of two workers at the Museum of Modern Art, the death of an 87-year-old vocal coach who was shoved to the ground on a Chelsea sidewalk and the disclosure that a gunman targeted homeless men in the streets of Lower Manhattan and Washington, D.C.

But in recent weeks, Mr. Adams — who had made addressing crime a central theme of his mayoral bid — has also begun emphasizing another core campaign message: New York needs to return to normal, and the mayor believes that time is now.

The mayor recently ended the mask mandate in schools and lifted proof-of-vaccination requirements for indoor activities. He has crisscrossed the city to convey the importance for the city to shed its pandemic way of life, making it a point to be seen at high-profile events like ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange and attending Fashion Week with Anna Wintour. He has even adopted a scolding tone toward those who are reluctant to return to the bustling streets of Manhattan.

“You can’t stay home in your pajamas all day,” Mr. Adams said at an event to announce his economic development team. “That is not who we are as a city. You need to be out cross-pollinating ideas, interacting with humans.”

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The city’s financial challenges are harrowing: The unemployment rate has remained high at about 7.5 percent, roughly double the national average; office vacancy rates rose to 20 percent, the highest level in four decades; tourism is not expected to recover until 2025; the city’s budget relies on billions of dollars in federal aid that won’t last forever.

Last week, Mr. Adams released a 59-page “blueprint” for the city’s recovery that focused on reducing gun violence, removing homeless people from the subway and making outdoor dining permanent — reflecting the guidance of business leaders.

“Job No. 1: You have to address the safety issue,” said Charles Phillips, the founder of a private-equity firm who organized the Gracie Mansion event. “The mayor understands that obviously, with his background. You have to make the city appealing from a safety standpoint.”

The business leaders told the mayor that the timing of New York City’s recovery was urgent.

“We just had our best week since Covid began in 2020 — occupancy last week was over 30 percent,” said Scott Rechler, chairman and chief executive of RXR Realty, a major commercial real estate firm and another adviser to the mayor. “That’s not a number I’m thrilled with — it’s usually in the 90s — but every CEO and head of H.R. has a plan in place to bring people back in the next 60 to 90 days.”

Two years into the pandemic, the city’s economy faces numerous challenges. With many employers expected to adopt a hybrid approach where workers would come in three days a week, sales tax revenue is expected to drop by $111 million a year. The occupancy rate for hotels, which had plunged as low as 40 percent in January when the Omicron variant hit, was at 67 percent in mid-March, according to STR, a hospitality analytics company.

Subway ridership is at about 60 percent of its prepandemic levels, and transit leaders have suggested that they can no longer rely heavily on fares to fund the system. On Broadway, just 20 shows are running at 41 houses, though attendance has been around 85 percent, and more shows are expected to open by the end of April.

Mary Ann Tighe, chief executive of the real estate firm CBRE for the New York region, said she had spoken with Mr. Adams several times since he took office, and has told him that it was important to make people feel comfortable returning.

“It’s about getting the basics right,” she said. “People will come back to a city that they feel safe in and that is clean, and those two conditions allow the city to do much of what it does organically — make great art, make great food, make great business deals.”

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In Mr. de Blasio’s final days as mayor, he continued to deliver near daily news briefings on the virus that consumed his last two years in office, claiming 40,000 lives in New York City.

Mr. Adams did not continue the practice. He regularly takes questions from journalists, but his last news conference dedicated to the virus and the city’s health care system — and not focused on relaxing restrictions or on economic recovery — was on Feb. 11 at a health center in Brooklyn, the same day he announced a $100 incentive for people who receive a booster shot.

He has not discussed the growing concerns in recent days over the BA.2 subvariant that is fueling a rise in cases in the United Kingdom. Instead, the mayor seems devoted to delivering a different message.

At a recent event in Times Square, Mr. Adams approached random pedestrians in search of a tourist. Finding one from Canada, he delivered a simple message: “Spend money.”

Three days later, Mr. Adams made the same pitch at the Blue Note jazz club in Greenwich Village: “Some of you are from out of town, and I have one request of you: Spend money.”

Beyond being the city’s cheerleader, Mr. Adams has also embraced the role of city psychologist, encouraging New Yorkers to move past the trauma of the pandemic and to stop “wallowing.” Mr. Adams said that removing masks in schools was an important step.

“The return to normalcy is about substantive things we have to do and symbolic things,” Mr. Adams said in an interview. “As much as we say things are normal, the face mask is a symbol that things are not. It’s time to see our faces again, particularly our children.”

Some elected officials were alarmed by Mr. Adams’s decision to remove masks at schools, pointing to low vaccination rates among some children. They also took issue with lifting the proof-of-vaccination requirement for restaurants, movie theaters and other indoor activities, arguing that the mandate made diners feel safer.

“I am worried that this is going to be interpreted as the pandemic is over, and that people are really just going to let their guard down,” said Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, a Democrat.

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But even as Mr. Adams has lifted some pandemic rules, he has also kept vaccine mandates for municipal workers and for employees of private companies who are working in person. The mayor’s health advisers insisted that those mandates be preserved and were comfortable relaxing the other rules once transmission fell to levels that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers low, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Mr. Adams said he kept the employer mandates because people spend more time in workplaces and have a longer risk of exposure over an eight-hour workday.

“The doctors feel strongly that that’s where the most susceptibility is in terms of passing on Covid,” he said in the interview.

Mr. Adams has also acknowledged that workers might not return to offices five days a week. He said he is open to converting office buildings in Midtown Manhattan to housing, and after visiting an office with water views recently, he mused, “I could put my kitchen here; I’d love to live here.”

Some critics, including Joseph Borelli, the Republican minority leader in the City Council who recently dined with Mr. Adams at Angelina’s restaurant in Staten Island, want the mayor to end the private sector mandates.

“They’re a barrier for those who may want to return to work in New York,” Mr. Borelli said, adding that a friend who was unvaccinated and worked in finance was working from an office in New Jersey to avoid complying with the city mandate.

Similar criticism has mounted over the status of another unvaccinated New York employee: Kyrie Irving, the Brooklyn Nets’ star point guard who is barred from playing in New York City. Mr. Irving’s teammate, Kevin Durant, suggested that Mr. Adams was “looking for attention”; LeBron James wrote on Twitter that banning Irving “makes absolutely zero sense,” adding the hashtag #FreeKyrie.

Mr. Adams suggested a simple solution.

“Kyrie can play tomorrow,” the mayor said at a recent news conference. “Get vaccinated.”

Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.

Russia is hemorrhaging outward-looking young professionals who were part of a global economy that has largely cut off their country.

Before the war broke out, only about 3,000 to 4,000 Russians were registered as workers in Armenia, according to officials. But in the two weeks following the invasion, at least an equal number arrived almost every day in this small country. While thousands have moved on to other destinations, government officials said late last week that about 20,000 remained. Tens of thousands more are looking to start new lives in other countries.

The speed and scale of the exodus are evidence of a seismic shift that the invasion set off inside Russia. Though President Vladimir V. Putin repressed dissent, Russia until last month remained a place where people could travel relatively unfettered overseas, with a mostly uncensored internet that gave a platform to independent media, a thriving tech industry and a world-class arts scene. Life was good, the émigrés said.

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For the new arrivals in Armenia, a sense of controlled panic overlays the guilt of leaving their families, friends and homeland, along with the fear of speaking openly and the sorrow of seeing a country they love doing something they hate.

“Most of those who left oppose the war because they are connected to the world and they understand what’s happening,” said Ivan, part-owner of a Cyprus-based video game development firm. He and many other Russian exiles interviewed in Armenia said they did not want to give their full names for fear of repercussions at home.

Ms. Loseva and her boyfriend, Roman Zhigalov, a 32-year-old web developer who works for the same company that she does, sat at a table in the crowded cafe with friends who were looking for a place to stay. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, she leaned against Mr. Zhigalov, closing her eyes as he put his arm around her shoulder.

“A month ago, I didn’t want to move to another country,” she said. “But now, I don’t want to go back. It’s not the country I want to live in anymore.”

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At other tables in the small cafe, young Russians tapped on laptops or checked their Apple watches. Some logged into Zoom meetings; others searched for places that they could afford to rent with their savings inaccessible.

But the plunge in the ruble, which at one point had lost about 40 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar, and the soaring housing costs in Armenia, which are priced in dollars, have left some who lived in stylish apartments in Moscow contemplating moves from budget hotels to even cheaper hostels with bunk beds and shared bathrooms.

Most of those who have come to Armenia work in I.T. and other sectors that rely on unfettered internet and international banking links, the country’s economy minister, Vahan Kerobyan, told The New York Times.

But among those who have fled Russia are also bloggers, journalists or activists who feared arrest under the country’s draconian new law that makes it a crime even to use the word “war” in connection with Ukraine.

Some of the recent Russian arrivals in Armenia said they have contracts that will pay them for at least a couple of months of working remotely if they can find a way to get the money. Others said they had been relocated to Armenia by U.S. and other I.T. firms, which continue to pay their salaries. But many have been left scrambling to access enough money to scrape together apartment deposits.

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Visa, Mastercard and PayPal have all cut ties with Russia, leaving only the Russian Mir bank card, which is accepted in Armenia and a very few other countries, for electronic payments.

Mira, 26, who works at an aid agency, said the night before she and her boyfriend left Moscow, they went from A.T.M. to A.T.M. for three hours, unsuccessfully trying to withdraw dollars. At every cash machine, people with bodyguards would push to the front of the line and withdraw $5,000 at a time until the machines were empty, she recalled.

“We couldn’t say anything because it felt really dangerous,” she said.

Tens of thousands of other Russian exiles have traveled to Georgia and Turkey. But Armenia, a former Soviet republic which has remained neutral in the conflict, has offered the softest landing. Unlike the reception in Georgia, none of the Russians interviewed said they had encountered hostility. Here, they can enter the country without visas or even passports and stay up to six months, and Russian is widely spoken.

For some, the anguish of leaving their country is compounded by the feeling that the world increasingly equates all Russians with their president.

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“I want to be with the rest of the world, not with Russia,” said Mr. Zhigalov, the web developer. “But we cannot be with the rest of the world because it feels like being Russian now is seen as a bad thing.”

Maria, a 30-year-old Russian travel guide editor who had arrived in Armenia the previous week, also worried about the hostility.

“What do people in America think of Russians?” she asked earnestly. “Do they hate us?”

Maria said she had been involved in anti-government protests in Russia in 2018.

“I was so scared,” she said of her decision to leave with her husband, a manager of a sports training center. “I was afraid of being arrested if I went out to protest. And to live there and do nothing, I don’t want to live like that.”

Most of the Russians interviewed said they left because crushing international sanctions had made it impossible to work for companies from other countries or with foreign clients, or because they feared that Russia could close its borders.

Like many of the men who left, her husband, Evgeny, feared that he could be conscripted and forced to fight in Ukraine. The couple scrambled to find a flight out of Moscow after most airlines had cut ties with Russia, eventually spending almost all the money they had on tickets for a flight to Yerevan.

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Many of those who left are entrepreneurs or freelancers in industries that relied on foreign clients, who have cut ties with them, even for work outside of Russia.

“They just tell us, ‘Sorry guys. We hope to work together in the future but right now, we cannot,’” Ivan, the video game developer, said of his European partners.

At another cafe, 35-year-old Alex, his blond hair pulled back with a hair tie and arms tattooed with milestones in his life, said he spent four hours at the Moscow airport while his flight was delayed, drinking gin and tonics.

“I just got drunk in the airport to get some courage,” he said. “I probably should have left earlier, but I’m in love with my country.”

Alex, who did not want to say what industry he worked in, said he cried as he listened to voice messages from Ukrainian friends who had been called up to fight.

“These guys were sitting around, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, playing music,” he said. “The next day, they had to go get a gun and defend their country. These were people who had never held a gun before. It’s horrible.”

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For many Russians, there is also the pain of a generational divide with parents and grandparents who grew up in the former Soviet Union.

“My parents, my grandma and grandpa are watching TV and totally believing the TV line so it hurts to speak with them,” said Mira, the aid worker. “At one point, I realized I loved them too much to argue. So I said, let’s not talk about it.”

“I don’t have any stable ground under my feet,” she said. “We are here now, but we don’t know where we will be in a week or a month, or even tomorrow.”

At the Yerevan airport last week, Viktoria Poymenova, 22, and her boyfriend, Bulat Mustafin, 24, from the Russian city of Mineralnye Vody, wheeled out a tower of suitcases, bulging backpacks and two small carriers holding their small rescue dog, Mukha, and their tortoiseshell cat, Kisya.

Mr. Mustafin, an engineer, worked as a technician for film projectors in cinemas, which are now unable to show films from Hollywood studios, since they have cut ties with Russia.

Ms. Poymenova teaches web programming for a Cyprus-based online school. Their plan was to find an affordable apartment in Georgia.

“If we don’t find one, we will come back here. And if we don’t find one here, we will go to Turkey. And if there is nothing, we will go to Serbia,” said Ms. Poymenova. “We just want a peaceful life, but it is very hard when your country is making such a disaster.”

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“We’ve moved to a place where we don’t need to know the absolute numbers,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents the public health agencies of all 50 states, Washington D.C., and U.S. territories. “We can still monitor trends for people who are getting tests in public settings. We still have a good sense of where the absolute numbers are going.”

He said that the reduction in reporting would not necessarily mean that states would be less prepared for new waves. Past spikes have come from variants that were discovered and sequenced internationally, including Delta and Omicron. “It was a matter of waiting until they got here,” Dr. Plescia pointed out.

The benefits of the daily data reporting has also shifted, according to Dr. Gigi Gronvall, a testing expert and a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University.

“We did see this in June, the attempt to report it more like flu, and it was warranted then,” she said. “In June, cases had dropped, and we did not yet have Delta. We didn’t have much demand for, and didn’t have, rapid antigen tests. Now the government has literally given everyone tests. People who are getting tested who are testing positive are almost certainly not telling their health departments. So the data is pretty wonky.”

She said that other indicators are more valuable at this point, like hospitalization and vaccination numbers and wastewater surveillance.

Dr. Plescia agreed, saying it was the right time to bring Covid reporting more in line with how public health agencies track other infectious diseases. He said that the result would be a more complete picture of the coronavirus’s trajectory because there would be more time to iron out the fluctuations of daily data. In fact, the daily data “does not necessarily influence the interventions that we’re considering,” he said.

However, some researchers warned that the drawdown of state reporting on pandemic metrics presented a threat to response times.

“Infectious diseases like SARS-CoV-2 move very quickly, and therefore we need to respond quickly to early signals of rising cases or a new variant,” said Dr. Sam Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. “Early action prevents school closures, mask mandates and saves lives. However, if we’re waiting around for days or weeks, or months for new data, it’s hard to see the signals quickly enough.”

Sarah Cahalan and Lisa Waananen Jones contributed reporting.